Top Unreported Stories of 2003 Project Censored

Dear
friends,

Project
Censored is an amazing group of professors, students, and professionals who
every year publish both a book and short reports on the top news
stories which were either ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media. A
summary of last year's list provided below proves quite revealing
and most informative. I highly recommend these very well
researched reports. A visit to their website at www.projectcensored.org may be well
worth your time. The news is getting out, and we are creating a better world,
one step at a time. Have a great day!

Censored!
Neocons' plans for global domination top the annual list of stories ignored
or downplayed by the mainstream media.

By Camille T. Taiara for the Bay Guardian

IF THERE'S ONE influence that has shaped worldwide political events over the
past year, it's the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the
events of Sept. 11, 2001, to solidify its military and economic control of
the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But
George W. Bush hasn't simply been responding to world events. The agenda his
administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that's
been in place for more than a decade.

The neoconservative blueprint for United States military domination is hardly
a secret. A group called the Project for a New American Century, a think tank
founded by hawks who are now in prominent jobs in the White House – released a
version of it three years ago--before 9/11. The document is shocking in its
candor: it asserts that the United States should be moving unilaterally to
assert military control around the globe, and that all that's necessary to
jump-start the effort is a "new Pearl Harbor."

Yet none of the major news media in this country have reported on this
document or on the fact that Bush is so closely following its script. [click here to
see the full report titled Rebuilding America's Defences, written by
the Bush team before the 2000 election, also mentioned on our 9/11 timeline]

That's the biggest "censored" story in the nation last year,
according to Sonoma State University's Project Censored, a 27-year-old
program dedicated to shining some light on the shortcomings of the major news
media.

Researchers at Sonoma State meticulously combed through news reports from
2002 and the first quarter of 2003 to find stories that didn't get the media
attention they deserved. This year's big stories include the attack on civil
liberties at home, Donald Rumsfeld's plan to provoke terrorists, and
treaty-busting by the United States.

In many cases, these stories got little or no play or else were presented
piecemeal, without any attempt to put the information in context. "The
stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy and governmental
transparency in the U.S. – and the corporate media's failure to alert the
public to these important issues," Project Censored director Prof. Peter
Phillips told the Bay Guardian.

What follows is the Bay Guardian's rundown of Project Censored's top
10 censored or underreported stories for last year:

1. The neoconservative plan for global dominance

"Terror: A question of when, not if," read the front-page headline
of the Sept. 7, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle. Americans, it argued,
will just have to get used to the fact that we're now engaged in a
"perpetual war."

Later that day Bush went on TV to ask the nation for another $87 billion for
the fight against terrorism. But the concept of "perpetual war,"
and the military strategy that comes with it – of unilateralism, preemptive
strikes, and a "forward presence" in key regions throughout the
globe – is nothing new. The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon simply provided the perfect rationale to implement existing
plans.

Back in the early 1990s, hawks in Bush Sr.'s administration--notably,
then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, with the help of General Colin Powell
and Paul Wolfowitz drew up a plan that was virtually identical to the
National Security Strategy unveiled in September 2002.

Their blueprint –was first spelled out in a classified internal policy
statement in 1992 titled "Defense Planning Guidance" (later
repeated in Cheney's "Defense Strategy for the 1990s," formally
released in January of 1993). It – called for the United States to assert its
military superiority to prevent the emergence of a new superpower rival.

It also called for the United States to diversify its military presence
throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued nuclear program
while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the
United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of
its allies. Sound familiar?

Yet the neocons knew they faced a hard sell as Bill Clinton took office.
"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources," a
report released by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 2000,
stated that the United States needed a catastrophe, "a new Pearl
Harbor," as the authors called it, to jump-start the neocons' blueprint
for all-encompassing military and economic world dominance. (PNAC was founded
by none other than Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and
other former Reagan and Bush administration hawks.)

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11--just nine months after the Bush
administration took office. The events of that day provided the perfect
excuse for Cheney and company to finally see their plans to fruition. Top on
their list of targets was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Within 24 hours of the
planes hitting the World Trade Center and Pentagon--and without so much as an
inkling of evidence as to who had carried out the attacks--Attorney General
John Ashcroft was already calling for war on Iraq, according to a report by
Bob Woodward in the Washington Post.

Indeed, the neocons have had the Persian Gulf in their crosshairs for 30
years now. Ever since the oil crisis of 1976 and the Gulf states'
nationalization of their petroleum industries in the years that preceded it,
the United States began building up forces in the region – primarily in Saudi
Arabia – and strengthening relationships with regional dictatorships. The
reasons seem simple: the region holds two-thirds of the world's oil.

The year 2002 ought to be remembered as the year when Big Brother came of
age. As the Pentagon waged unending war abroad in the name of battling
terrorism, the Bush administration pursued a parallel, wholesale war on
dissent at home, fusing foreign intelligence operations with domestic
security.

Agencies such as the FBI were granted sweeping powers to spy on U.S.
citizens. Civil liberties took the greatest hit in the last 30 years, as the
feds consistently slashed away at our basic constitutional rights--including
the right to privacy, to any semblance of a fair trial in cases broadly
defined as terrorism-related, and to the freedoms of speech, association, and
assembly. The Bush administration undertook all this and much more by means
of the USA PATRIOT Act, executive orders, and the newly created Department of
Homeland Security.

On Oct. 1, 2002, the government established the Northern Command, – a branch
of the U.S. armed forces empowered to coordinate military
"assistance" to domestic law enforcement agencies. That was just
the latest in a push to allow the federal government to use the U.S. military
against its own citizens in the event of mass civil unrest. (That trend
wasn't without precedent: an anonymous Justice Department official told the Seattle
Weekly, in late December 1999, that the feds had deployed an elite U.S.
Army strike force by the name of the Delta Force, to infiltrate the
now-infamous anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations in that city weeks
earlier.)

Yet media coverage of these measures was piecemeal at best, – and failed to
shed light on the sordid details and ominous repercussions that accompanied
them.

Bush administration insiders often take extreme measures to protect their
own, – including those who supplied Saddam Hussein's regime with weapons of
mass destruction and training on how to use them.

Even as Bush urged military action against Iraq for the country's failure to
divulge details of its alleged chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal, the
U.S. government covertly removed 8,000 of the 11,800 pages of the weapons
declaration the Iraqi government had submitted to the United Nations Security
Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But the Iraqis released copies of the full report to key media outlets in
Europe. It turns out that the missing pages may have contained damning
details on 24 US-based corporations, various federal departments and nuclear
weapons labs, and several high-ranking members of the Reagan and Bush
administrations that, from 1983 until 1990, helped supply Hussein with botulinum
toxins, anthrax, gas gangrene bacteria, the makings for nuclear weapons, and
associated instruction. Among those implicated: Eastman Kodak, Dupont,
Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, the U.S. Department of Energy and
Department of Agriculture, the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia nuclear
weapons labs, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield.

Michael I. Niman, The Humanist and ArtVoice, March/April
2003.

4. Rumsfield's plan to provoke terrorists

Buried deep in one of its Sunday issues late last October, the Los
Angeles Times published a story by military analyst William Arkin about
a slew of secret armies the Pentagon had been creating around the world. One
such force caught the eye of regular CounterPunch contributor Chris
Floyd, who picked up on the tip and ran with it.

"According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense
Science Board, the new organization – the 'Proactive, Preemptive Operations
Group (dubbed the "Pee-Twos")' – will carry out secret missions
designed to 'stimulate reactions' among terrorist groups, provoking them into
committing violent acts which would then expose them to 'counterattack' by
U.S. forces," Floyd wrote.

In short, the alleged document seemed to show that the Pentagon was gearing
up to actively instigate terrorist acts, despite the risk to innocent
civilians.

What better way to make those pesky unions disappear than by branding them a
threat to national security? That's precisely what the neocons in the White
House and on Capitol Hill have been doing – in a blatant move to break some
of the country's most powerful labor syndicates. And, so far, they've gotten
away with it.

Bush, – certainly not known as a stalwart of workers' rights, invoked his war
on terrorism rhetoric in early October 2002 to force striking International
Longshore and Warehouse Union dock workers in Oakland back on the job,
thereby undermining the future of the ILWU's West Coast labor agreement.

Then, when the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland
Security, its Secretary Tom Ridge invoked similar reasoning to argue that the
department's employees be exempted from civil service regulations governing
pay scales, hiring and promotion practices, bans on discrimination,
whistle-blower protections, and, – last but not least, –collective bargaining
rights.

All the stories that make up this year's Project Censored winners were
gleaned from alternative and international media sources. Likewise,
progressives quickly learned to seek out sources like CommonDreams.org,
truthout.org, and the U.K. Independent's Web site for the real news on the
latest war on Iraq. The Internet has functioned as the single most important
medium for accessing these kinds of information.

But if the big communications
companies get their way, the Web could be compromised as a democratic source
of alternative news and perspectives. Soon, what we get from the Web could be
a carbon copy of what we already get from corporate TV, cable, radio, and
newspapers.

For several years now, businesses that provide access to the Web – cable,
telephone, and (more recently) satellite companies – have been working to
cash in on their control over distribution. Unlike the companies controlling
the telephone lines (which by law must grant access to any company that wants
to use them) the Federal Communications Commission opted, in spring 2002, to
grant cable companies full control over who could use their cable
networks--and under what terms. Cable companies can now manage the speed at
which different sites pop up, block out any content they choose, and even
deny sites and ISPs access to their lines altogether. Of course, the
telephone companies have since been lobbying for the same exclusive rights
over DSL.

The telephone and cable lines are controlled by monopolies in most U.S.
cities and towns. Comcast, now the world's largest cable company, exerts sole
control over cable lines serving almost one third of U.S. households.

Arthur Stamoulis, Dollars and Sense, September 2002.

7. Treaty busting by the United States.

Even as the Bush administration publicly demanded that terrorists be brought
to justice and that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and others dismantle their
(in Iraq's case, alleged) nuclear weapons programs, it consistently worked to
undermine hard-fought international agreements, – including numerous treaties
and the international court system – meant to do just that.

In fact, the United States has now "either blatantly violated or
gradually subverted" at least nine multilateral treaties on which it is
a signatory, Project Censored found. These include the Kyoto Protocol on
global warming, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons
Commission, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel
Mines, the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, and the Rome Statute of the
ICC. Bush has also voted to authorize a U.S. military attack on the
International Criminal Court in The Hague should the ICC dare try any
American for war crimes.

All these action have been taken in the name of national security. Yet,
"this unprecedented rejection of and rapid retreat from global treaties
... will render these treaties and conventions invalid without the support
and participation of the world's foremost superpower," wrote Project
Censored's authors.

8. U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons
despite massive evidence of negative health effects.

Former Sergeant First Class Carol Picou will never be the same after serving
in the first Gulf War. On the frontlines with a mobile medical unit, "I
noticed that all the bodies that were on the highways and tanks and
all the armament that was damaged was burnt," the veteran nurse
told Hustler magazine last spring. "It was actually literally
black, and I thought the Iraqi people were black-skinned. It amazed me that
they were burnt that bad, – that we would have used some type of armament that
would actually melt these people into their vehicles."

Picou began experiencing serious health effects almost immediately. Back in
the United States, her muscles were deteriorating. She permanently lost
control of her bowels. She suffered from 104-degree fevers, and her skin
would break open and bleed. Rather than take care of Picou, who had served in
the armed forces since 1978, the Army medically discharged her against her
wishes in 1995.

"More than 9,600 of the relatively young Operation Desert Storm veterans
have died since serving in Iraq, a statistical anomaly" wrote Dan
Kapelovitz, the reporter who interviewed Picou. Of those still living, more
than a third, – upward of 236,000, have filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims
with the Veteran's Administration.

Research overwhelmingly suggests these ailments and deaths were caused by
depleted uranium, a metal the military uses in much of its hardware that is
so dense it can pierce through steel-armored tanks. But this radioactive
material has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, according to renowned
scientist Helen Caldicott. In Iraq incidences of cancer, childhood leukemia,
and rare mutations in newborns have skyrocketed.

A study conducted by the U.S. Army in 1990, at least six months before the
first Gulf War, shows the U.S. government knew what the effects would be.
Nonetheless, the Americans and Brits dropped anywhere between 300 to 800 tons
of the stuff on Iraq over the four-day assault. They've done nothing to clean
up the radioactive mess left behind. "In effect, George Bush Sr. used
weapons of mass destruction on his own people," Kapelovitz continued.

But it didn't end there. The United States has since used depleted uranium
weapons in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and again during its most recent
assault on Iraq, – a fact that was reported in the European media but not
widely in the United States.

Dan Kaplevitz, Hustler Magazine, June 2003; Reese Erlich, Children
of War, March 2003.

Rather than allow the international community to supply sufficient security
forces to safeguard Afghan citizens from brutal warlords--and thereby create
the foundation necessary for democracy and reconstruction--the United States
has instead financed and armed regional warlords in its effort to root out
the last remaining al-Qaeda forces.

As a result, by October 2002, a year after the U.S. embarked on its campaign
to "liberate" that war-torn Central Asian country, private armies
were estimated to be 700,000 strong. (The International Security Assistance
Force, in contrast, consists of a scant 5,000 troops, only enough to provide
meager protection for Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.)

The practice has, in effect, strengthened the nation's endemic system of
military feudalism. The heroin trade has skyrocketed to record highs. Life expectancy
is a mere 46 years, with more than one in four children not making it to
their fifth birthday. Only 10 percent of those children who survived had
access to an education. In many regions the constraints placed on women's
basic liberties have reverted to those imposed by the Taliban. Per capita
average yearly income was only $280. And the basic infrastructure needed to
reintroduce law and order, like a working justice system, banking
institutions, a national army, remained a pipe dream.

In short, thanks to American policies, Afghanis are more forsaken than ever.
Yet, Afghanistan has once again dropped off the corporate media's radar,
and with it, that of the American public.

Many Americans are now at least marginally aware of recent neoliberal economic
programs such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and Plan
Colombia. But how many have heard of the New Partnership for Africa's
Development (NEPAD), a plan being forwarded by the world's most powerful
industrialized nations?

NEPAD was launched at the G8 meeting in June 2002, presumably to help combat
poverty in Africa by encouraging outside investment. Curiously enough, the
architects of the program didn't bother to consult with representatives of a
single African nation while drawing up their plans. Critics fear the program
is just another bid by more powerful nations to exploit the continent's last
remaining natural resources – at the expense of Africans themselves.

First-world meddling has already wrought havoc on Africa. During the cold war,
the United States alone injected $1.5 billion worth of weaponry and training
into the continent, now the most war-torn in the world. From 1991 to 1995 the
U.S. increased its military contributions to 50 out of Africa's 53 nations.
Millions have died from war, displacement, disease, and starvation as a
result.

Meanwhile, structural adjustment programs force-fed to African nations by the
IMF, World Bank, and G8 in the name of development have only resulted in the
continent's foreign debt rising by a whopping 500 percent over the past 20
years. More of the same isn't likely to help.

For
more on these stories, and to learn more about Project Censored and it's
great work, see www.projectcensored.org.

A special note from Fred:

As
a result of my work with the www.WantToKnow.info
website, I've come into contact not only with a large international network
of cover-up researchers like Project Censored, I've also had significant
personal contact with a number of deep insiders who have worked many
years in the FBI, CIA, DEA, and more. I frequently receive powerful,
sometimes very disturbing information from these sources. I rarely send out
this kind of information to this list, as many people don't really want to
know all the dark underbelly of everything that is happening. For those
who are interested in receiving some of this deep information, I've
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wish you all the very best in these powerful times which present us with both
many challenges and many opportunities.

With
love and warm wishes,

Fred
Burks

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